My carrots

They're so dead. I planted 'em almost two weeks ago and still nothing's showing. Isai, however, says they can take up to twelve days to germinate so I'm still harboring a little hope. The radishes on the other hand are kicking ass, and we've got sweet peppers going in a little nursery. Also bananas are coming on strong right now. I mean, specifically minimos. What we call bananas are here called minimos, or the little sweet kind, as opposed to platanos, the big gnarly kind that you have to cook and taste kind of like a potato but way better when they're green, and kind of like a sweet potato when they're ripe. They make a snack bags out of green platanos that are almost exactly like potato chips but are way the hell better. My PC friend Josh and I are already planning to make our fortunes when we come back to the USA by taking the snack industry by storm with platano chips. Anyways I'm psyched about the minimos because I haven't had a banana in forever. Here I am in the banana republic too, it's kind of wierd. I just can't get 'em back to my place from the market in Choluteca without completely destroying them.

I haven't done a whole heck of a lot this week. I taught more spanish (went better this time, I'm getting a feel for the pace now) and had another soccer game on Sunday. This time we hiked about 8 km one way to the game from Agua Fria, plus the 2 km from my place to Agua Fria for me. I'm pretty sure I hiked at least 20km, (12 miles) plus we had two games again. This time I got to rest more though because we had a ton of players... I totaled obout one game's worth of playing time. There were three teams and we played a round robin. We won our first game in penalty kicks and lost the second, ending in second place. Our real goalie showed up this time (he must have been busy before) and was the main reason we won at all. He is one of the best goalies I've ever played with or against.... nice having that peace of mind knowing he's always back there. Oh and my teammates are already telling me I'm ok but I need to be more aggressive. Sound familiar dad? :)

I'd like to be telling you all about the sweet projects I've been working on, but soccer is almost the most interesting thing in my life right now. So that's what I got. This weekend I'm going to Nacaome (a town in the southwest part of Honduras, close to El Salvador) to visit some other volunteers and take a boat tour of some mangrove swamps. They're trying to develop the tourism industry there as an alternative to the shrimp farming that has all but wiped out the mangrove swamps in Honduras, which are supposed to be a pretty unique environment. Looking forward to that. There's no english classes or soccer game this weekend so this trip came in nicely to give me something to do.

Other interesting tidbit is that I went to the town El Corpus, where they have what you might call the county seat (here it's the municipalidad) to check it out. There wasn't much going on in the municipalidad, but Corpus is a totally beautiful colonial mining town. I happened upon a "community communication center" which was actually a phone terminal and internet cafe with some really nice computers. I wonder where they got 'em. There were some kids playing Need for Speed Underground (a popular racing game, for those of you who don't know) and the computers also had Unreal Tournament 2003 which is part of the series of games that I used to play the most. It was kind of surprising. This internet cafe that I go to here in Choluteca is also a gaming center. Community gaming centers are a lot more common here than in the states because people can't afford their own equipment and they're obviously a popular social hangout for the schoolkids. It's yet another instance where I've been struck by the extent to which some technology has become cemented here, and some is still lagging. There's computers that can run UT2003 smooth as butter in this small colonial pueblo of El Corpus, but the entire country has alomst no garbage disposal system. It's interesting.

Til next week. :)

Gabe